Making Friends with Reality – Marilyn S.

Hello, I am Marilyn and I'm an alcoholic. Really happy to be here and grateful to Larry for the invitation to come and participate in this good meeting. And the drive was good tonight and that's not always the case in coming to San Diego. So that was a special surprise and the meeting has been wonderful so far. This is the holiday season, and I get a little agitated and jumpy during the holiday season. And I remember early in sobriety, my sobriete date is February 8th, 1972, so this amazing program has kept me sober now for well over 40 years. But they used to say, maybe they still do say, we come, after a while we come to, then way later we come to believe. And I was coming too, and it was the holiday season, but my sobriety date is February, so it took me a while to come too, I guess. And one of my early memories was a Christmas tree, so took almost a year to come to. But I was there and there were three little children, and by that time I had realized that they're my little children and um and there were a lot of little presents because my mother was there a grandma and she was i had a greater presence of mind than i did in early sobriety so she made sure there were whole lot little presents and and our two little daughters opened their presents and there was some candy canes and games and dolls and they were playing happily and that was And so long ago that there were no video games, and so toys didn't make much noise. And they were just happily playing. And our little son David was opening all of his presents, and he got about 25 because Grandma was there. And he opened the last one and burst into tears. And my mother said, David, why are you so sad? And he said, I didn't get just what I always wanted. And she said, oh, David, what is that? And he says, I don't know. I just know I didn' t get it. And that was the story of my life up until that point. And as I walked into sobriety and was introduced to things like inventories and amends and all of that, it changed my perspective because I realized I was born in Ohio. I hated Ohio mainly because of so many happy people there, happy and wholesome. And it just, I knew I could never be like them. I couldn't talk to them. I didn't know that language that they seemed to speak so easily. They could answer these questions like, how are you? And I never learned that. And I had, well, my dad was in a terrible auto crash when I was a small child and lay in a coma for about 12 years. And my mom worked hard. She worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and she'd get up early and go out to work to make a life for herself and this strange child. And she just did that, you know, like strong Ohio people. And I'd come home from school, and as I got up in those years when I could be alone, I would come home, and I noticed that I'd go to somebody else's house, and there would be a mom there with a pretty apron, and she would bake cookies and like Christina's cake for the meeting, something homemade and the house would smell good and we'd drink milk and eat cookies. And then I'd go home and I'd give my mom a hard time when she finally struggled at home. Why aren't you at home baking cookies? That was just my sense of entitlement that somehow the whole world should respond to my every whim and I didn't appreciate what she did until well into sobriety. She also tucked away money so that I could go away and study. And I wanted to be a scientist. I don't know why I wanted To be a Scientist, but I look back and I think, well, it was certainly escape. But it also answers questions like we bring, many of us bring into Alcoholics Anonymous, like what in the world is this all about? I mean, life is so hard and horrible. What is the meaning of it all? And science could kind of get at that. And it seemed to have answers. Now, the answers are things like, where did we all come from? So scientists would say, Big Bang. And in those days I thought, well, now I know where we came from. Now, those are two words and it doesn't mean anything really. But it offered promise. And so I just thought another thing, too. If I could become a scientist, then I'd learn a language, an esoteric language. But it would be a language that would allow me at least to talk to other scientists. Certainly not the whole human race, but at least there would be some of us that could just sit around in lab coats and talk to each other. And then I also thought that if I could be a great scientist, I could win a Nobel Prize and I would pin it on my shirt. And then everybody would say, there's Marilyn, that great Nobel Prize winner. We want to be her friend. And thenI'd finally have some friends. And so for that reason, I just wanted to go study science. So my mom would tuck away money and save it. And again, I took that for granted. and I did go away to study science and went off to Chicago and worked in a lab at the Fermi Institute and before I worked there I had to get the job and I went into a lab and a person came out with a big white lab coat and he was all pale like he'd been in a laboratory all of his life and so exciting And he had a slide rule in his pocket. Now, that's an old-fashioned calculator. But it just spelled science with a capital S for me. And I wanted to grab and fondle his slide rule. and I got the job and so so I was working there in the lab and and I was getting acquainted with my tall pale scientist and And we'd talk about things like Gaggenbauer polynomials and the theory of relativity. And there's one. I gasp. I think about my scientists and get too excited. So we'd talk together about all of these wonderful things. And he went off to Washington and sent me a postcard, and it had a picture of the Lincoln Memorial. And I turned it over, and it said, Marilyn, I was thinking about what you said, and all I can come up with is... And he wrote out this elegant partial differential equation. And no man had ever talked to me like this before. And then one day, he said, do you want to get married? And I said, yes. Now, by that time, Bill and I were both confirmed atheists. Science was the answer. That was our higher power. But his dad was a Lutheran minister. So we went back to Ohio, and we're in this little religious ceremony. and his dad was saying things like better for worse, rich or poor, love, cherish. And Bill said, I do. And he had no idea what he was agreeing to getting himself involved in. And so I said also, I don't know. I do when I heard those words. But what I meant was now I can attach to you like a tick on a dog and suck out your life. And I proceeded, and I did just that. So now many of you are sober for some length of time, and you know that that is the recipe for miserable living. And I, by that time, was pretty much just a sick and hideous parasite and would attach to any warm mammal that came along. And most would just flick me off and run away, but sometimes I could attach. But Bill got deeply involved in this work, and that was a great higher power for him. And one day we got into a terrible argument about the nature of gravitational force. And Bill put me to shame with superior knowledge, so I punished him. I stopped talking to him for two or three years. And that really upset me because when I stopped talk to him, he got real happy. So we went off to Los Angeles and Bill was a scientist and by that time I had a white lab coat and I was trying to be a scientist. But my work was not going well because, again, I just carried my sense of entitlement into my work in the lab and I had been given a nice opportunity like one of those dazzling presents, a lab to work in, a wonderful director, a well-funded lab and I said, and I heard that I had done a research project that was suggested to me by the director but when I heard that I thought, no, that's beneath me, that's Mickey Mouse. I couldn't win the Nobel Prize with that. And I just ignored what the director said and went about just doing what I wanted to do. And what I seemed to want to do was just mix a lot of stuff together to make it turn color and just sort of like a child with a chemistry set. And now I look back on that time, and I think this was a wonderful opportunity, a great gift, which I just simply squandered and didn't ask for help, didn't pay attention to what the director was trying to ask me to do, and as a consequence I began to get pretty paranoid because I kept thinking that people were saying bad things about me, because that was probably true, but it was noticeable, and I was just getting to that place where they've begun to notice, and they're plotting against me, and feeling horrible because I was getting to that place that I knew would make me a happy person, namely being a scientist. I looked like one. I had a white lab coat. I even had my own slide rule and yet I was feeling more miserable than I had back in Ohio and then I got rescued and it was the second best thing that ever happened to me. The first best thing of course is Alcoholics Anonymous but the second most thing was the discovery of what alcohol could do for me. And that happened because we entered the, I guess it was around the mid or early 60s. And if you missed that, too bad, because that was a time for people like us. It was so fantastic. And it just seemed like one day everybody started drinking a whole lot. And it didn't happen suddenly. But for me, it was just like watching that movie, The Wizard of Oz, where it's all gray and Kansas. And then she enters the Emerald City, and everything's technicolor. And it just, everything was beautiful when I began to drink. And it happened when I was in the lab. People just got out the lab alcohol. And, I mean, it has a federal seal on it, but we'd break it and drink it. Now, it's against the law, but this was the 60s. And we put in a hard hour's work in the lab, and then we'd go up on campus and try to close down the university. And I had no idea why we tried to do that, but it just seemed like a good idea. And then we would go out to bars at night and drink, and it was wonderful. Some people in Alcoholics Anonymous say that the progression of alcoholism is fun. and then it's fun with problems and then its problems and these were the fun days for me I felt like a real scientist now I felt that I had lab mates to talk to and I'd go home and home did not seem so lonely anymore I didn't mind that Bill was a better scientist just life was beautiful and wonderful and then I began to drink more than other people apparently and they would say, Marilyn, why do you drink so much? And I would say everybody drinks so much. But apparently they weren't. They were not drinking in the lab as much as I did and they were actually doing work. But I just kept drinking and then one day the director asked me what I'd been doing for those three or four years that I'd done it. I'd never been there. And I could not remember. and that seemed to be the end of my career in science. He didn't tell me to go away, but I went home and said I'd think about it and what to write up, and after three months of sitting on my couch, I just mailed the keys back because I couldn't think of what I'd been doing. I wrote inventories about that and certainly had to make amends to that director, but in writing an inventory, I realized that what I had done on my research project was truly nothing. And so here I was at home and just wondering how it went so terribly wrong, fun with problems. Drinking still was my salvation, but it was a terribly isolated existence. That's when I gave birth to quite a few children. And I didn't know how that was happening, and I seemed not to be able to stop it, but my life was out of control big time. And it seemed like there were six of them, but there were really only three. It just looked like six. And they wanted things like food. And I was just so hopeless. But the grandmas, my mother and Bill's mother, moved in because they saw that this is a catastrophe. And they talked to me about getting sober, stopping. I should stop drinking so much. But I had to drink. Life was so painful that it was unbearable not to drink That was the one thing that made it possible to get through a day. They talked about Alcoholics Anonymous. And I visited the fellowship. And whenever I went to meetings, I stayed sober just on the strength of going to meetings. I'm very subject to peer pressure. I knew that I could not sit in a meeting and drink a can of beer. I mean, it's frowned on. And then I'd go home, and people would call me, and so I wouldn't drink between meetings even. But then after a while, I'd think, okay, now I got it. And thenI'd go back home and practice. So there were several years like that. My first trip into AA was in 1969, but sobriety did not come to me until 1972, so I was doing that visitation. One time I was taking the children off to preschool, and the director said, could you wait? I want to talk with you. And the little children were entered in, and she said, you seem to be a troubled mom. We have a little therapy group for troubled moms, And I'd encourage you to go to that. It's done by the head director of the preschool. And it was that cold hand around the heart, they've begun to notice kind of thing. And I knew I had to do it because I needed her approval. A part of, it seems that maybe not for everybody, but along with my deep character defect of being a sick and hideous parasite is also the need to please, to get you to like me. I mean, I didn't like you, but I wanted you to like me and I wanted the director to like me. So I went to the low therapy group and I had to drink a lot of beer before I went. It was my favorite by this time. Any alcohol would do, but definitely beer was good. And so I went in and I sat in the little circle and something went on, but then we finally got to go home. And I thought, good, I've done that. And as I was going out the door, he said, see you next week, same time. And I though, this is ongoing? But wanting to please him desperately, I knew I had to go back. And so after two or three of these sessions, he asked me, he says, would you stay? Would you stay after? I want to talk with you. And again, they've begun to notice that horrible feeling. And after everybody else had left the room, he said, let me ask you a question. Have you ever thought about going to Alcoholics Anonymous? And I just wanted to say, well, like Miss Piggy, moi? Why would you ask that? And he said well, because you wobble in and you always smell like alcohol. and tonight you were sitting in your chair and you were listing way over to the side and then you fell on the floor and I had no defense because I couldn't remember it so I then began to defend myself as much as I could I said, you know, I actually I've visited those meetings at the urging of a few people and I don't think it's my problem but I can't do that I have these little children at home, and my husband goes back to his lab at night. So I really can't do that. You know, you go to those meetings, so they want to sign you up and make you go out every night. And it's just dreadful. And he looked at me and he said, well, I hear what you're saying, but if you really want to do something nice for your family, if you'd like to give them something nice, you should get your head screwed on right. And I thought, that is cold. But I filed that away for future reference. And so I drank for another year or so. And then one morning I was really, really sick and I called central office and they sent someone to get me. And I said, I can't do this. But I remembered, he said, you know, you ought to get your own head screwed on right. and I'd been waking up morning after morning and thinking, I'm not going to drink today. And then I'd drink again and the grandmas moved in and I was kind of relegated to the garage where I couldn't cause any harm. And it was a dreadful life and so I called central office and they sent someone to get me. If you're new and you want to keep drinking, don't give them your address. And so the wonderful Lorena came, though. And I wasn't welcoming it, but now I realize that that made all the difference in the world. That's the first time anybody paid a 12-step call on me. and she is sober up in Ojai to this day over 40 years of sobriety and still working with others she was my first really, really good example and it just taught me that being of service is really one alcoholic working with another is a huge, huge part of recovery for us I do believe so she took me to a meeting before we went to a meet I told her some requirements, and I said, don't take me to the Pacific group. That's a great big active group in West L.A., and way too intrusive, way too, I mean, it's kind of like this meeting, actually, with friendly people and lots of intrusve questions. Do you have a sponsor? Do youhave a home group? Do you go to lots of meetings? Do youhave a job at this meeting? And, yeah, friendly. That's the word they used. In those days, it seemed more like carnivorous. But she said she'd take me to a dark, quiet meeting, and I wondered if she knew somebody named Marion, and she didn't know Marion, but she said if I stay sober and Marion's sober, we'll meet up sometime. Come along, she said. So she waited until it was time, stayed there with me so I couldn't drink my beer, and we went off to a Dark Quiet meeting. And I could sleep in the first half. It was so quiet and dark. And then they settled down after the coffee break, and the leader got up to the podium and said, Our main speaker tonight is Marion. And it was the Marion I had wanted to meet that I'd seen from afar when I'd visited meetings. And I never introduced myself. I was kind of waiting for her to come over and say, I want to be your sponsor. You look wonderful. And she never did. But there she was. And she was talking, and in my alcoholic fog, I thought, wow, this is an amazing coincidence. And that was the beginning of the mystery for me. As I said, I came in as an atheist, pretty confirmed in that, and looked to science for answers. But I began to see that this is pretty remarkable. And to this day, I feel that that was a remarkable coincidence. There have been many other remarkable coincidences. and I've been led along a path of recovery even though I don't understand how something like this could work and eventually that's what allowed me to allow my mind to open just a little bit to say, okay God if you're there, I'd like to get to know you and that's because I just looked out and I heard people's stories I looked at the clientele. I mean, think about it. Think of who we are. People like us, I mean people like me out of my garage, just a failure in all of life. We could come together and we could heal one another when the great minds at the manager clinic and Harvard, they just really can't get to first base with alcoholism. And there are treatment centers and they start up. and unless they have a spiritual basis, usually one of the directors gets drunk and crashes a car. It's true. But somehow with our second tradition where our one authority is a loving God, as God expresses God's self in our group conscience, that seems to make all the difference in the world. And so that was the beginning. That was the begining of being open to that for me, the fact that Marion was there at that first meeting. So after the meeting, I ran up and attached to her like a fungus on a tree and never let me go, never let my go. And I asked her to be my sponsor, and she agreed to do that if I would come to her home group, the Pacific Group. Oh, no, not that one. I said, I'm a scientist, I told her. And she said, well, that's fine, but I can't be your sponsor. We'd have to go to the same home group. But by that time, I had already attached and I wanted Marion and I didn't want her to get away. And I said, even that. And off I went to this big active group in West L.A. And I'm a member of that group to this day, the Pacific Group in West LA. So that was the right group for me. I didn's know it at the time. So much of what has happened to me in this fellowship has been something that just doesn't seem like, no, that's not the answer. but it really is just exactly what I needed, this big active group well I needed custodial care is what I need in those days there were not the kind of facilities that there are now maybe there were but I didn't know about them led into the steps and then ushered into the program a program of recovery but that kind of active group strong sponsorship ethic just made me accountable pretty much every waking moment. And in the beginning, I was just forced into the fellowship, do what everybody else is doing. And in our home group, we have what we call classes. I'm in the class of 72 because that's the year I got sober. And there aren't many of us left, but most of us in the last many years, 20 years, have died sober. And so we're losing some of our members, but not because they go out and drink. and I just lost my friend of 40 years, Beverly. We got sober just six weeks apart and gave each other birthday cakes for 40 years and she passed away last week and yet she was in her 70s and she died sober and that is moving into the next phase, whatever it is and we know it's wonderful as our book says, we're safe here and in the hereafter And that is what we all hope for, that we can lead this life and pass out of it in sobriety. So that is good. But I miss her. I miss er after 40 years of having a friend. And then I met another friend, Diana, and we became friends. We were a little different in that we both knew that we were very different. And I was at my Ohio Street meeting and she came over and she introduced herself and she came in about a year after I did and she began to tell me her tale of woe that her case was truly different and she said it was different because she said, you know, I'm married to a scientist and I said, oh, so am I and she says, but I have three children and I say, oh so do I and she goes, but gee, I like classical music and I go, oh but I'm fascinated by the German language And I said, so am I. But I went to the University of Chicago. And I thought, oh, so did I. And anyway, we just went on and on like that. And we just kind of looked at each other. And we became friends. And we went off into a corner. And we realized that our case is different. And so we just sort of watched and judged and just knew that this just doesn't make much sense to us because, I mean, it's so different from, say, an academic environment where you have professionals and professors and textbooks. Well, we have a textbook, but no exams, so it can't work. and there's no diplomas, we don't graduate, so what is this? And so we sat there and we tried to figure it out and finally realized we can't figure it Out. It's too mysterious. It's Too Wonderful and Mysterious. But the one thing we realized that was just so obvious and so evident was that this works and nothing else on Earth does work for alcoholics. This works. And that's very convincing. and so we joined in and I'm happy to say that both of us have been fully invested in Alcoholics Anonymous after about five or six years it actually became fun but those first years for people that are as hard headed as me that was rough and hard because I had to be wrenched around into a whole different way of thinking listening to other people, trying to be of service to other people, I'd never done anything like that in my life with my sense of entitlement, and yet the more I did that, the happier I got. I wasn't really, really happy until about 18 years of sobriety, but I was okay. I mean, I could go out. I went back to work. I made amends as best I could in my family. I began to grow up with my children, and Bill and I began talking about more things than science, and it just seemed like we were passing for normal and that was good. Our son and I began to climb mountains together. He wanted to be a rock climber and so we went to the Sierra Club and we began to do a lot of rock climbing and that is something that I never expected to happen and that's what I did. That was fun and I watched him grow into a young man and pretty soon he began climbing way beyond mom and he went off and climbed with people that could really climb and I found some dull climbing mates and our two daughters went through that thing of just getting involved with hideous jerks and we'd just sit and be so sad and little Susie, our baby, was one night just so sad because her boyfriend Tom had been in front of Rocky Horror Picture Show with his arm around Amber and her little heart was breaking and I said, Susie if you just get through tonight and put a few days together, you will come to see what a jerk Tom is. And I'm happy to say that she did and went on to meet Steve and they're married and have three little children and I'm a grandma now. And I kind of missed it when the kids were growing up, but I really see these little ones. There's six little grandchildren now, five little boys, And finally, a little girl, little Claire, who is doted on as a princess. And I used to talk. I'm very old and have been sober a long time. And so as the years went by, I just began to have this tale like Methuselah where it just goes on and on with all these incarnations. But anyway, for some years, I said when I was about 18 years sober, I'd gone off to Israel with Susie. She had been on a kibbutz for half a year with her friend who had gone to find her roots or something. So anyway, they were there and it was wonderful and they learned Hebrew. And so I went to Israel and Susie was kind of my tour guide by that time. And we were both at that place. Susie had gotten out of high school and didn't have any direction in her life. And I had been active in the fellowship And I had just gotten to that place where I was almost thinking, is that all there is? And I was doing kind of quieter AA. And for some reason, it happened to both of us in Israel. And it had something, some kind of spiritual component. And if you think about it, if God wants to do something big, God often does it in Israel, right? And Susie and I came back, and Susie, for some reason, had some kind of spark. And she went away and studied science, and she's a professor in a medical school now. And that sort of was born in Israel. And I came black, and I just wanted to do something more and was inspired to throw myself back into my home group, the Pacific Group, and was acting like a newcomer. I went to a meeting every night. I wentto every activity. I wentt o all the Southern California conventions. I just did it all. We have these watches where you stay up till midnight and sing happy birthday to somebody who's turning one year sober, and we move furniture on Sunday. Now, if nobody wants to move, we come in and move somebody's furniture anyway and it keeps you sober. and by doing that i just went into such joyful years at that point i began to feel so happy and i would never understand why that could happen by just being so active in alcoholics anonymous it just makes the world technicolor again but it does every time i just kind of begin to think is that all there is? Luckily, I get drawn back into the program. Like I look on the calendar and there's something that says, come to San Diego and give a talk. Okay. I get in the car and I listen to something nice, a book on tape or an AACD and get down here and meet some friendly people and go back. And that reignites that spark again. The more active I am, the more time I have for other things, the happier I am. and so I used to end talks with grow old along with me the best is yet to be the last of life for which the first was made it's a poem by Browning and it just sort of sums up if we're in Alcoholics Anonymous we lay a foundation and the best is yet to be because it just gets better and better and I had an acquaintance with God my higher power which is guaranteed by the twelfth step having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps And I was speaking in Las Vegas last December, December 9th. And I had to talk about steps two and three. And talking about coming into a relationship with God and then kind of losing it when my world gets shaken up by something surprising. And then it reforms because of being active in the fellowship and then coming into a deeper relationship with my higher power. And I used the phrase, I found that in extremis, God meets me 90% of the way. Now, I don't know why I said that, but now I do. At the time, it just seemed to follow logically. But I realized that that was what I needed to hear because when I got off the podium, there were frantic messages on my cell phone. And our son's new wife, he had been married for a year and a half, couldn't find David, our son. and he was living in Irvine and had started a company and life seemed to be wonderful beautiful new bride of a year and a half and yet she couldn't find him and the other family members were drawn into the situation and I was in Las Vegas Bill was in West LA Aaron, his wife, was in Ir vine and our daughter, young daughter, was in Indiana. We were all talking on the phone. So Aaron, his wife, went to the place where he worked, and his car was in the parking lot. And there was a light on in his office window, but the door was locked, and he wouldn't answer. And finally the police were drawn in, and they went in, and he had committed suicide in his house. Now, how did that happen? I don't know. We have no idea. He seemed to have a life that most people would envy and want. And yet, it could be that David grew up and had the set of emotions that I have. He never responded to alcohol like I did. It just didn't make him happy. It just made him sleepy and uncoordinated, like my husband. So alcohol was not an answer for him. So he may have had my emotions, but no relief from that. and yet, for some reason, could not find resolution. Maybe he lived a life like I did for so many years, which was I never did get just what I always wanted. I don't know what it is, but I just know I didn't get it. But I can tell you that Alcoholics Anonymous is a superorganism. It's when one person is down, it just seems like almost everybody else knows about it. I went home that night I drove across the desert all night long but I had one CD in the car and it was Sandy B from Tampa whose two daughters had died the year before, one to our disease the other was murdered and I had that to listen to and he said that if you find yourself in a situation like that I'm going to tell you precisely what I did and this is what you should do you go out to God and you say, this is a terrible thing that's happened but I'm not going to abandon you so please don't abandon me. You are the most important thing in my life and I want you to stay that way. And then he said, and you do this and guess who, when you begin to react guess who comes back with you. So I played that and then I practiced it. I went out to my higher power and I said, please hold on to me. I want You to guide me through this. I wantYou to be the most important thing in my life and i did that and then i played the cd again and i did that several times and then at three o'clock in the morning i realized that my friend diana of all those years our case was different diana uh that she was weighing up in new york where she now lives and we're still good friends and i knew that i could call her and she knew david when he was a little guy and watched him grow up even went climbing with us and after about a half an hour she grasped what I was saying to her and she said, now I'm just going to talk to you. And she talked me all the way back into Los Angeles as I was driving and we talked about our years together growing up in sobriety. We talked about going to Germany because we both loved the German language. We're so much alike and she knows me better than I know myself and we've talked about all of those things. We even talked about pornography. And I don't know how we got that far, but it happened. And she was even on the phone. I parked the car and went in, and then I began to comfort Bill. And Bill was so proud of his son, loved his son. And he's not an alcoholic, and so he does not have a fellowship like i have so i knew my work was cut out for me and by that time i'd begun to get phone calls from our my good friend julie current was the current secretary of our big home group she had lost her beloved son 10 years before in a terrible auto accident and she was one of the first people to call as i say we're a super organism and everybody somehow just seemed to know. And I had seen her go through that terrible thing, and I knew that she had just gotten more active in Alcoholics Anonymous and that life was good. And she said, let me tell you that even something so terrible can be used for something good. Watch for the gifts. Now, that was hard to believe at that time, but I was supported. I was embraced by fellowship and carried along. As time has gone by, I realize that that is true, that if I've learned anything it is that I must, if I want to live peacefully on earth, make friends with reality. And if I do that, that God can turn anything into something useful. I certainly now have something to share with other people who will go through a similar thing. And that has happened several times. Our family is much closer than it ever was before. We recognize in a new way the preciousness of life and to look for the signs in one another, something that we must have missed in David. And we're not afraid to say I love you before we were just kind of shy about that kind of thing. We're much closer together. A person that I sponsor was at work when she heard the news, and she let people know, and a lot of people from the fellowship worked there. And one person at work realized the impact of what had happened. That very morning, she had written a suicide note, and she had gone to work and she was going to go home and leap off her building but she saw that when a person does that the ripple effect is that so many lives are touched she thought about her own mother and how that would affect her because she heard how that affected me and she went home and she tore up her suicide note and she is about 8 months sober in Alcoholics Anonymous now and she's another person, and she is happy. I can see that by just hanging in and trusting that even something so dreadful, something that I would give my life a thousand times over for it not to happen, can be used for something good. I think that I am coming around to realize that it really is true. The best is yet to be. Thank you. Thank you.